Hasbro, the Rhode Island company that owns the trademark to the 60-year-old board game, Scrabble, on which Scrabulous is closely based, has also asked Facebook to remove the game under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, saying that it infringes the company’s intellectual property. Facebook has not yet responded to or commented on the request.

As Josh Quitner writes, "[A]s a tech writer and life-long student of what passes for Internet economics, I’m baffled. Is Hasbro just a stupid Potato Head? Or is this a brilliant game of Stratego?" And Mike Masnick observes:

The Scrabulous/Hasbro situation is a perfect example of Matt Mason's thesis that "piracy" is almost never about "theft." It's almost always a market indicator that the market is unhappy with what's being offered. It's the market showing companies what they want.

You may be right. Certainly the Hasbro/EA deal to deliver Scrabble through the iPhone using Facebook Connect tools (see http://www.tuaw.com/2009/03/24/scrabble-for-iphone-gets-a-facebook-boost/) seems to be a smart move to win back the Facebook based market for electronic Scrabble. But if Hasbro had been a little smarter in the first place it wouldn't now have to "win back" that market. I don't think many people last year were questioning Hasbro's legal rights to stop Scrabulous. Rather, most of the criticism was directed at the business judgment Hasbro exercise in doing so. That certainly was my point -- that having a legal right doesn't always mean that exercising that right is a smart thing. And one has to wonder if in the long run Hasbro wouldn't have been better off cutting the creators of Scrabulous in on the deal. If Hasbro had done so, the iPhone/Facebook app would be far more likely have been a bigger success from the get-go than it otherwise might turn out to be.

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This blog is an ongoing exploration of issues related to copyright and fair use in our contemporary digital culture.The blog began and continued through April 2008 as a class project in Peter Friedman’s Legal Analysis & Writing classes at Case Western Reserve University of Law during the spring 2008 semester. The students wrote cross-motions for summary judgment in a fictional lawsuit brought by the owners of the copyright to "Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)." The Plaintiffs (represented by half of my students) alleged infringement of their copyright in Que Sera, Sera by the KLF, the real-life creators of an actual recording entitled "K Cera Cera."K Cera Cera (mp3) is a recording of the Red Army Choir singing an amalgam of Que Sera, Sera and John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Happy Xmas (the War is Over). The second half of the students, of course, represented the Defendants.In the course of the students' work in researching and writing their summary judgment briefs, the professor and the students posted items here that raise and explore the legal and policy implications implicit in and related to the infringement claim and Defendants' fair use defense.The relevant documents the students had to work from were the following: